1 This publication presents statistics of finance commitments made by significant lenders for the purposes of secured housing finance for owner occupation, other personal finance, commercial finance and lease finance.

2 Secured housing finance for owner occupation is secured finance to individuals for the purchase or construction of dwellings for owner occupation, and for alterations and additions to existing owner occupied dwellings. Refinancing involving a change of lender is also included, while refinancing with the same lender is excluded from all estimates.

3 Personal finance, other than secured housing finance for owner occupation, is finance provided to individuals for their personal, non-business, use. Both fixed loans and revolving credit finance are included.

4 Commercial finance is finance provided to individuals and corporations for business or investment purposes, including for the construction or purchase of dwellings for rental or resale. Fixed loans, revolving credit and commercial hire purchase are included.

5 Lease finance includes finance and leverage leases. Operating lease finance statistics are provided as spreadsheets on Details tab of this issue.

SCOPE

6 Finance commitments made by the following types of lenders are included:

7 The statistics cover all bank commitments, and all commitments for secured housing finance for owner occupation made by permanent building societies. Of the remaining commitments, the largest lenders for each of secured housing finance for owner occupation, other personal finance, commercial finance and lease finance are covered, so that when calculated separately for each of the four broad categories of purpose finance, at least 95% of Australia-wide finance commitments and at least 90% of each state's finance commitments are covered. While many lenders other than banks are not covered, at least 70% coverage is maintained for all published lender types (including the Other Lenders series and Other Lessors series).

8 An annual collection is conducted to maintain and update the survey coverage. New lenders are included as their lending for any of the four categories of finance becomes sufficiently large.

9 From June 2001, the statistics for:

secured housing finance for owner occupation cover all commitments by banks and permanent building societies, and commitments by all other lenders which provided more than $50m for housing finance in 2000

personal finance cover all commitments by banks, and commitments by all other lenders which provided more than $96m for personal finance in 2000.

10 From June 2002, the statistics for:

commercial finance cover all commitments by banks, and commitments by all other lenders which provided more than $484m for commercial finance in 2001

lease finance cover all commitments by banks, and commitments by all other lenders which provided funds of more than $31m for lease finance in 2001.

11 Additional smaller lenders are also covered where it is necessary to maintain collection coverage (as specified in paragraph 7).

SOURCES

12 For banks, credit cooperatives, building societies and RFCs, the statistics in this publication are currently derived from returns submitted to the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). The Financial Sector (Collection of Data) Act 2001 facilitates the collection of statistical data from the financial sector, with APRA established as the central point for collection of both prudential and statistical data. In October 2001, APRA implemented new reporting forms for building societies and credit cooperatives. New reporting forms were implemented for banks in March 2002, and for RFCs in March 2003. APRA commenced collecting loan commitments data from banks, credit cooperatives, building societies in July 2002 and from RFCs in March 2003.

13 Secured housing finance commitments for owner occupied housing from banks, building societies and credit cooperatives are derived from form ARF 392.0 Housing Finance collected by APRA. Personal finance commitments from these lenders are sourced from the ARF 394.0 Personal Finance. Commercial finance commitments from these lenders are sourced from the ARF 391.0 Commercial Finance and from the ARF 394.0 Personal Finance for fixed loans for personal investment purposes. Lease finance commitments are sourced from the ARF 393.0 Lease Finance.

16 All other institutions, including securitisation vehicles, are collected directly by the ABS.

REVISIONS

17 Revisions to previously published statistics are included in the publication as they occur.

18 Changes in the classification of lenders (e.g. the conversion of a permanent building society to a bank) are reflected in the Lender series from the month of the change. Data for earlier periods for such lenders are not reclassified. Details of the establishment of new banks are published in the Reserve Bank of Australia's monthly Bulletin in the section on Technical Notes to Tables.

SEASONAL ADJUSTMENT

19 Seasonal adjustment is a means of removing the estimated effects of normal seasonal variation and ‘trading day effects’. A ‘trading day effect’ reflects the varying amounts of activity on different days of the week and the different number of days of the week in any month (i.e. the number of Sundays, Mondays, etc.). This effect may be partly caused by the reporting practices of the lenders. Adjustment is also made for Easter which may affect the March and April estimates differently. Trading day effects are removed from the original estimates prior to the seasonal adjustment process. Seasonal adjustment does not remove the effect of irregular or non-seasonal influences (e.g. a change in interest rates) from the seasonally adjusted series.

20 The lending finance series uses a concurrent seasonal adjustment methodology to derive the seasonal adjustment factors. This means that original estimates available at the current reference month are used to estimate seasonal factors for the current and previous months. As a result of this methodology, the seasonally adjusted and trend estimates for earlier periods can be revised each month. However, in most instances, the only noticeable revisions will be to the previous month and the same month a year ago.

TREND ESTIMATES

21 Smoothing seasonally adjusted series reduces the impact of the irregular component of the seasonally adjusted series and creates trend estimates. These trend estimates are derived by applying a 13 term Henderson-weighted moving average to all but the last six months of the respective seasonally adjusted series. Trend series are created for the last six months by applying surrogates of the Henderson moving average to the seasonally adjusted series. For further information, refer to Information Paper: A Guide to Interpreting Time Series - Monitoring Trends: An Overview (cat. no. 1349.0) or contact the Assistant Director, Time Series Analysis on Canberra (02) 6252 6345 or by email at <timeseries@abs.gov.au>.

22 While the smoothing technique described in paragraph 21 enables trend estimates to be produced for the latest few months, it does result in revisions to the trend estimates as new data become available. Generally, revisions become smaller over time and, after three months, usually have a negligible impact on the series. Changes in the original data and re-estimation of seasonal factors may also lead to revisions to the trend.

EFFECTS OF ROUNDING

23 Where figures have been rounded, discrepancies may occur between sums of the component items and totals. Percentage changes presented in the commentary are based on unrounded data and may differ slightly from percentage changes calculated from the rounded data presented in the tables in this publication.

ABS DATA AVAILABLE ON REQUEST

24 Estimates for months prior to those shown in this publication and more detailed series are available in spreadsheet format from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) web site. For more information, contact the ABS National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070.

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

25 Users may also wish to refer to the following ABS releases:

Housing Finance, Australia (cat. no. 5609.0)

Assets and Liabilities of Australian Securitisers (cat. no. 5232.0.0.55.001)

26 In addition, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) produces the monthly Reserve Bank of Australia Bulletin, the tables of which are available on the RBA web site <http://www.rba.gov.au>. The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) also publishes a range of finance statistics on its web site <http://www.apra.gov.au>.

27 Current publications produced by the ABS are listed in the Catalogue of Publications and Products (cat. no. 1101.0). The Catalogue is available from any ABS office or the ABS web site <http://www.abs.gov.au>. The ABS also issues a daily Release Advice on the web site which details products to be released in the week ahead.

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